Behind every bouquet lies a workforce measured in the millions — mostly women, mostly poor, often working in conditions that the consumers who buy their flowers would struggle to recognise as decent. From the greenhouses of the Netherlands to the highland farms of Ethiopia, this is the story of the people who make the flower industry work, and what the industry does to them in return.
On the morning of February 12th, at a rose farm on the Sabana de Bogotá, a woman named María has been on her feet since 4 a.m. It is not yet light. Around her in the greenhouse, hundreds of other workers move between the rose rows in silence, clipping stems to a specific length, de-thorning, sorting by grade, bundling. The pace is set not by the workers but by production targets that have been rising every year for two decades. In the days before Valentine’s Day, those targets increase by around 30 percent. Some workers will not leave until midnight. Under Colombian labour law, this overtime should be compensated at a premium rate. In practice, whether that premium is paid — fully, partially, or at all — depends on the employer, the contract type, and factors that workers often have little power to contest.
“You work because you need the job,” a worker at a different Colombian farm told a labour researcher some years ago, in a formulation so widely repeated across the global flower industry that it has become, inadvertently, the industry’s most honest slogan. Across the producing countries that supply the world’s roses, carnations, lilies, and gerberas — Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, Ethiopia, the Netherlands — hundreds of thousands of people work in conditions defined by that same calculus: the absence of alternatives, the presence of need, and the power that accrues, in that combination, to those who employ them.
The industry employs these people at scale. It is, in many producing regions, among the largest formal employers available to rural women. That fact matters. It is also insufficient to end the conversation.
Colombia: The Women Who Build the Valentine’s Day Industry
Colombia’s flower industry was born in the late 1960s, when American economists identified the Sabana de Bogotá’s climate, altitude, and cheap labour as ideal for producing cut flowers for the US market. Within two decades, the sector had become one of Colombia’s largest export industries. Today it employs approximately 200,000 people directly and supports livelihoods for many more through ancillary logistics, packaging, and transport.
Around 60 percent of those workers are women. A significant proportion are single mothers and heads of households — women for whom the flower farm paycheck is not supplementary income but the family’s primary economic lifeline. This demographic reality has shaped everything about the industry’s labour dynamic, in ways that are not always flattering to the employers involved.
In Colombia, new workers have historically been subjected to illegal pregnancy tests, and employers have frequently dismissed pregnant workers. The practice, while prohibited under Colombian law, was documented persistently by labour rights organisations through the 1990s and 2000s and has not entirely disappeared, though enforcement has improved. The reasoning behind it is cynical but economically coherent from the employer’s perspective: pregnant workers are entitled to maternity protections and cannot be dismissed, which conflicts with the industry’s deep reliance on temporary contracts.
Temporary, short-term contracts are arguably the defining feature of Colombian flower industry employment. Many women in the Colombian cut flower industry are only granted temporary job contracts even after many years of employment, causing insecure livelihoods. The renewal of these contracts is at the employer’s discretion, which means that a worker who complains about conditions, attempts to organise, or simply becomes inconvenient can find their contract simply not renewed — a dismissal that generates no severance obligation and leaves no formal record of dispute.
During peak seasons, leading up to both Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, employees often work 12 to 22 hour shifts, earning little additional pay and suffering significant health impacts from repetitive activities and pesticide exposure. Workloads and production goals increase each year, and workers have consistently been denied their right to unionise or collectively bargain.
The union question in Colombia has a bloody history. During the 1990s and early 2000s, labour organisers in Colombian agriculture faced violence from paramilitary groups with links to large landowners — a pattern documented extensively by human rights organisations. The flower sector was not immune. Workers who attempted to organise independent unions faced not only dismissal but, in the worst cases, threats and physical intimidation. The US government, responding to pressure from labour advocates, made improvements in Colombian labour rights a condition of the bilateral free trade agreement signed in 2011, and a joint action plan was established to monitor compliance.
Progress has been real but uneven. The industry’s main association, Asocolflores, has invested considerably in its Florverde certification programme, which sets standards for worker welfare, environmental management, and chemical use. In 2024, the Florverde Sustainable Flowers certification received recognition from the Consumer Goods Forum as a transparent certification that ensures ethical and socially responsible practices in floriculture. The industry cites these credentials prominently. Labour monitors note that certification compliance varies between member companies, and that non-member farms — a significant portion of the sector — operate outside these frameworks entirely.
Wages remain a fundamental pressure point. The industry employs hundreds of thousands, many in rural areas where alternative employment opportunities are limited. Flower farms have historically been significant contributors to economic development in regions surrounding Bogotá, providing wages where few other formal employers exist. But those wages, even at the legal minimum, often fall short of what researchers define as a living wage — the amount needed to cover basic needs for a worker and their dependants. For female single-headed households working full-time on flower farms, living below the poverty line despite formal employment is not exceptional; it is, in many documented cases, the norm.
Ecuador: Altitude, Roses, and the Long Shadow of Union Busting
Ecuador grows the world’s most prized roses — long-stemmed, large-headed varieties whose intense colour and structural perfection command premium prices in European and American markets. The conditions that produce these flowers — high altitude, equatorial sunshine, fertile volcanic soil — also produce an industry that has built its competitive advantage substantially on labour costs that remain, in the language of global trade, “competitive.”
Ecuador has a long history of union busting. Barriers to effective unionisation are high, and problems with freedom of association are well documented. Workers who attempt to organise face a range of retaliatory measures: dismissal, blacklisting, the formation of employer-sponsored “solidarity associations” that fill the formal space a genuine union might otherwise occupy without exercising any genuine collective bargaining function.
The water conflict in the town of Tabacundo, in the north of the country, illustrates the power dynamics that govern Ecuador’s flower-growing regions more broadly. In 2006, smallholder farmers organised to contest the allocation of irrigation water, which had been channelled predominantly to large flower farms at the expense of food growers. Despite a legal resolution nominally in the smallholders’ favour, most water has continued to be allocated to the large cut flower companies in practice — an outcome that speaks to the gulf between formal rights and exercised power in Ecuador’s agricultural regions.
Pesticide exposure is a serious health concern across Ecuador’s flower farms. The enclosed greenhouse environment concentrates chemical applications. Workers — particularly those involved in spraying operations — face exposure to fungicides, insecticides, and growth regulators, sometimes without adequate protective equipment. Studies conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s found elevated rates of neurological symptoms, skin conditions, and reproductive health complications among flower workers, particularly women. The industry’s response — improved protective equipment, integrated pest management programmes, and third-party auditing — has produced genuine improvements on certified farms. On uncertified operations, the picture is harder to verify and the incentives for improvement are weaker.
In Ecuador, the law provides for higher wages than in some peer producing countries, but even there the pay is not enough to cover basic needs. Ecuador’s minimum wage is among the higher ones in Latin American agricultural sectors, and the country’s labour law provides protections that are, on paper, relatively robust. The gap between what the law provides and what workers actually receive is filled by the same factors that operate across the industry: temporary contracts, overtime that is unpaid or partially paid, and the disciplinary power that comes from being the dominant employer in regions with few alternatives.
Kenya: The Promise and the Reality of Lake Naivasha
Around Lake Naivasha, flower farming has transformed an entire regional economy. In Kenya there are approximately 127 flower farms currently in operation, with over 500,000 people in the country depending on the industry for their livelihoods, of whom around 90,000 are directly employed on farms. The sector accounts for roughly 12 percent of Kenya’s total export revenues — a figure that makes it one of the most economically significant agricultural industries in the country.
Kenya’s flower industry is older and more institutionally developed than its Ethiopian counterpart. It has two industry-specific labour organisations — the Kenya Plantation and Agricultural Workers Union (KPAWU) and the Agricultural Employers Association (AEA) — and a functioning system of collective bargaining agreements that set minimum wage floors for the sector. These structures have produced genuine improvements over the decades: safety standards are generally higher on certified Kenyan farms than on comparable operations in Ethiopia or Ecuador, and worker representation, while far from perfect, is more developed.
But the Kenya Human Rights Commission’s bluntly titled 2012 report, “Wilting in Bloom: The Irony of Women’s Labour Rights in the Cut-Flower Sector in Kenya,” captured a tension that has not resolved itself in the years since its publication. Women make up the majority of the flower industry workforce, and the risks they face include sexual harassment, insecure contracts, and poor housing. Reliance on casual and migrant labour, alongside weak oversight, compounds vulnerabilities to exploitation.
The casual and seasonal contract system is as central to Kenyan flower labour relations as it is in Colombia. Farms hire significantly more workers in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day and other peak seasons, drawing on pools of casual labour who are paid daily rates without benefits, pension contributions, or job security. When the peak ends, casual workers are released. The arithmetic is straightforward: it transfers the cost of market fluctuation from the employer to the worker.
In Kenya, workers are paid only 50 to 65 percent of what researchers calculate as the living wage — the income required to afford adequate food, housing, healthcare, and education for a typical family. This gap is not simply a matter of tight margins at the farm level. It reflects a supply chain in which the price pressure flows steadily downward from the major European auction houses and retail buyers — who extract significant value at the point of resale — to the growers, and from the growers to the workers, who have the least bargaining power and bear the most concentrated risk.
As of recent years, wages in Kenya’s agricultural sector have been rising, driven by inflation, higher living costs, and increasing labour union activity. Strikes and labour disputes have become more frequent, with workers demanding better wages, improved working conditions, and stronger labour protections. The direction of travel, in Kenya at least, is cautiously positive. But the pace is slow, and the gap between current wages and a genuine living wage remains substantial.
Ethiopia: The Newest Frontier, and Its Costs
Ethiopia entered the global flower trade in the early 2000s, attracted by investors — primarily Dutch and Israeli — who saw in the country’s highland climate, cheap land, and extremely low wages an opportunity to produce flowers at costs significantly below established competitors. The government offered incentives: subsidised land, tax holidays, duty-free access to inputs. The industry grew with remarkable speed.
In Ethiopia, it is estimated that over 180,000 jobs have been created by the rapid rise of the flower industry, and that 85 percent of those employed in the industry are women. That concentration is not coincidental. Women in Ethiopia, as in Colombia, Kenya, and Ecuador, represent the labour pool most available to low-wage agricultural employment — because of limited alternatives, because of family structures that constrain mobility, and because employers in industries dependent on manual dexterity and attention to detail have found that female workers perform these tasks reliably and cheaply.
The social picture that surrounds this employment is complicated. Low wages, issues with workers’ health and occupational safety, sexual harassment, regular violations of workers’ rights and freedoms, and surrounding community health concerns are all documented issues associated with the Ethiopian floriculture industry. Ethiopia, unlike Kenya, does not have a legal requirement for farms to accommodate workers — meaning employees may travel long distances to work, or pay for private accommodation in rapidly inflating informal settlements that have grown around flower farming zones.
Discrimination against unionised workers has been reported in Ethiopia. The country has only a single trade union federation covering farm workers, and it is not industry-specific, limiting its effectiveness as a representative body for flower workers specifically. The absence of effective collective bargaining infrastructure leaves workers with few formal mechanisms through which to contest their conditions.
The Fairtrade Floor Wage for floriculture, introduced in 2017, was set at approximately 80 percent higher than entry-level base wages in Ethiopia at the time — a statistic that is as illuminating about the Floor Wage’s ambition as it is about the baseline wages it was designed to improve. Even at the Fairtrade minimum, Ethiopian flower workers earn far less than their Kenyan counterparts, which has been a source of competitive tension: Ethiopian farms can undercut Kenyan prices precisely because their labour costs are lower, creating pressure throughout the region to resist wage improvements that would erode that competitive edge.
The floriculture industry in Ethiopia has also displaced smallholder farmers. The state has transferred land to flower companies, often with little or no compensation to the farmers previously working it. Growing flowers for export on land that previously produced food, in a country that faces chronic food insecurity, raises questions that go beyond the labour market and into the politics of development itself. Whose interests does the flower industry serve? The foreign exchange earnings accrue to the state. The profits accrue predominantly to investors, many of them foreign. The wages accrue to the workers — and those wages, in Ethiopia’s case, are the part of the equation most subject to downward pressure.
The Netherlands: A Different Kind of Precarity
It would be comfortable to frame the labour problems of the global flower trade as a feature of the Global South — a consequence of poverty, weak governance, and the exploitative terms on which developing countries participate in international markets. The Netherlands complicates that framing.
Dutch greenhouse horticulture — including the flower sector — is among the most productive agricultural systems on earth, operating in one of Europe’s wealthiest countries, under one of the continent’s more developed regulatory frameworks. And yet its labour model has been identified, repeatedly, by the Dutch Labour Inspectorate as one of the highest-risk sectors for worker exploitation in the Netherlands.
The mechanism is not poverty wages in the developing world sense. It is something structurally different: the systematic use of migrant labour from Central and Eastern Europe, funnelled through temporary employment agencies, in conditions of dependency that limit workers’ ability to contest their treatment.
The share of migrant workers from Central and Eastern European countries in the Dutch agricultural labour force is highest in the horticultural hubs of South and North Holland. The average hourly pay of workers from these countries is lowest compared to Dutch and other foreign workers, and the majority hold fixed-term contracts.
The dependency is compounded by a common practice of bundling employment with accommodation — what the industry calls “package deals.” An employer or agency provides housing alongside a job. The practical consequence is that migrant workers who are also dependent on their employer for housing face the threat of homelessness on top of dismissal if they complain or organise. Workers far from home, often without Dutch language skills, and uncertain of their legal rights, are in a structurally weak negotiating position regardless of what the law formally guarantees.
The Dutch Labour Inspectorate considers agriculture one of the top risk sectors for unfair work in the country. In Dutch agriculture, “a flexible contract with a low wage and little certainty is the rule rather than the exception,” and employment agencies, contracting, and payrolling are widely used as mechanisms to reduce labour costs below the legally required minimum.
The Covid-19 pandemic placed these contradictions in the spotlight, as the high productivity of Dutch horticulture was shown to coexist with the low labour and living standards of the Central and Eastern European workers who made it possible. Workers housed in cramped shared accommodation, dependent on employers for their daily lives, with limited access to healthcare and union representation: the circumstances bore an uncomfortable structural resemblance to the conditions labour advocates document in developing country flower farms, albeit at higher absolute wage levels.
The Dutch government has responded with incremental reform. A 2015 law placed liability for unpaid wages across the supply chain, not just with the immediate employer. Further legislation since has sought to tighten registration requirements for employment agencies. Glastuinbouw Nederland, the representative body for Dutch greenhouse growers, has articulated a principle that the rights applying to Dutch employees should also apply to migrant workers, and has invested in language classes, pension schemes, and collective labour agreements. Whether the practice matches the principle is a question the Labour Inspectorate continues to investigate.
The Price of a Flower, Revisited
The global cut flower market was valued at approximately $37 billion in 2023. The workers who grow, cut, sort, pack, and load those flowers share a remarkably small portion of that value. The United States alone imported $2 billion in cut flowers in 2023, making it the world’s largest import market. The price paid at the retail level — fifteen dollars for a bunch of roses at a supermarket, sixty dollars for an arranged bouquet at a florist — bears no visible relationship to the wages paid to the workers at the bottom of the chain.
That relationship exists, however. It runs through the auction prices at Schiphol and Aalsmeer, through the margin requirements of supermarket buyers, through the farm-gate prices that Colombian, Kenyan, and Ethiopian growers receive — and it arrives, attenuated and diminished, at the workers who do the cutting. The supply chain distributes value upward, and risk downward, with a consistency that is neither accidental nor invisible to those who study it.
Certification schemes — Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, MPS, the Floriculture Sustainability Initiative’s basket of standards — represent the industry’s most serious attempt to address this distribution. Producer associations in developing countries have introduced codes of practice: the KFC Code of Practice in Kenya, Asocolflores’s Florverde in Colombia, and the EHPEA Code of Practice in Ethiopia. These frameworks vary in rigour, in the independence of their auditing, and in the degree to which they translate into measurable improvements in workers’ lives. The evidence suggests they do produce improvements on certified farms. They do not cover the entire industry, and certification compliance is not the same as comprehensive worker protection.
The deeper structural problem — that wages across producing countries remain well below living wage levels, that temporary contracts are the norm, that the right to organise is contested or suppressed in most of the major producing countries — is not addressable by certification alone. It requires changes in what buyers pay, how supply chain responsibilities are allocated, and what governments enforce. All three of those changes are politically contested, economically costly for the parties with the most power, and therefore slow.
What the Bouquet Doesn’t Say
On Valentine’s Day, somewhere in the world, a bouquet of roses is being unwrapped. The cellophane comes off. The flowers smell of cold storage and something floral. They are, almost certainly, beautiful.
The woman who cut those stems — in Bogotá, in Naivasha, in Addis Ababa, in Westland — is not named on the cellophane. Her wages are not printed on the card. The hours she worked in the week before the bouquet was assembled are not disclosed anywhere in the transaction. She is, in the most literal sense, invisible at the point of purchase.
That invisibility is not natural. It is constructed — by supply chains deliberately opaque about their lower rungs, by markets that price flowers without pricing the conditions of their production, and by consumers for whom the connection between a fourteen-dollar bunch of roses and the fourteen-hour shifts that produced them is, in the absence of any mechanism to make it legible, simply not available to consider.
The first step toward a different kind of flower industry is making that connection visible. The second step — changing what we do with what we see — is harder, and more necessary, and has barely begun.